David Nirenberg on Anti-Judaism

Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans; Christians and Muslims of every period; even the secularists of modernity have used Judaism in constructing their visions of the world. What relationship do these uses have to each other? Do past forms of life and thought affect later ones? If so, can we write a history of these forms? And what, if any, hold might this history of past thought have upon ways in which we ourselves can think in the present?

Please join us for the Alexander Grass Eminent Lecture by David Nirenberg (University of Chicago) entitled, “Does the History of Anti-Judaism have anything to do with the Present?” on Tuesday, January 20th, 2015, at 5:30 PM in Library East, Judaica Suite. This lecture is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish Studies.

David Nirenberg is Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences, and Founding Director of the University’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. His books have focused on how Jewish, Christian, and Islamic societies have interacted with and thought about each other. These include Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996), Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013); Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Medieval and Modern (2014), and the forthcoming Aesthetic Theology and its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics (Spring 2015).